America's Top 10 Favorite Street Foods

For hundreds of years, aristocrats savored delicate webs of sugar spun by elite chefs, but for regular people, that sweet, melt-in-your-mouth sensation was far too expensive. Then, in 1897, John C. Wharton and William Morrison invented a machine that melted and spun the sugar with ease. In 1904, they brought their machine to the St. Louis World's Fair, where it was a huge success. In the 1970s, a further innovation fully automated the process all the way through packaging the confection in paper or plastic bags. Today, it's hard to imagine a street fair without those pink, azure and ultramarine clouds of what used to be called fairy floss.

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Is street food under threat? According to Consumers International, street food makes up nearly half of the developing world's diet, yet globalization is eroding the regional variety of street food. If you love street food and want to protect its future, you can learn more at Street food.org.